


Midnight in Montgomery

by veracity



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-27
Updated: 2006-11-27
Packaged: 2017-10-18 12:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veracity/pseuds/veracity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are things worth risking death for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midnight in Montgomery

**Author's Note:**

> ****Spoilers:** Up to “The Return, Part 1” (3.10).  
> **
> 
> Song by Alan Jackson inspired the piece, though it doesn’t really stay in the realm. Betaed by [](http://daisycm83.livejournal.com/profile)[**daisycm83**](http://daisycm83.livejournal.com/) (thank you!).

There is something in the air, shimmering just beyond human vision. She can feel it prickling along her skin, calling out like an abandoned lover along lonely, haunted cliffs. It isn’t something she could touch, prove, but it still exists; has since the Wraith attack nearly two years prior, and if she thinks about it very hard, then probably longer. Perhaps the feeling simply is a warning. Or a matter of residual emotions that has nowhere else to go except to stay and tries to communicate with people long since dead. Possibly a phantom of long-fought war, but she doesn’t think so. It feels different. A cool breeze in a warm room, touching just enough to bring to mind those ghost stories told around a summer camp’s fire, and leaving her stomach queasy for hours afterwards.

The supernatural can’t be denied when she lives in a city that was previously thought to be a mythical city, in a galaxy that is weeks away from Earth even by the fastest transportation. It’s that belief in the supernatural that has kept her awake, watching and waiting for something that can’t be pinpointed or described. No one talks about it, maybe in order to pretend it doesn’t exist, or maybe no one else is able to feel it. It stalks her, that knowledge just out of reach; a tantalizing puzzle to be solved but missing key pieces.

There are unused rooms that take every bit of will and strength to continue visiting because something is lying in wait, ready to pounce; walking into them causes her to pause, getting strange looks if anyone is with her, and a cold vice closes around her lungs. It steals her breath, causes the room to freeze, as if the temperature had dropped, and she can see each person’s breath, hear the individual heartbeats thumping. On Earth it would be called a spirit, or a haunting, but the Ancients left the city to sink until her team re-discovered it. She knows this, was told by that _other_ her. A person that she had mourned, as if it hadn’t been her frail body that she saw die.

Not long ago, she had been certain that there would be no chance to roam Atlantis’s halls again, to communicate with the walls and live within them, to exist in a city attuned with those inhabiting it. But she is here now, protecting what is hers, as does the rest of her team. The city doesn’t light up as she walks through, as if greeting a long lost friend like John, but it still lets her know that she belongs here. If these weird disturbances are all that she must deal with, then it’s a light price to pay. Nanites, ascended beings hovering and watching, the Wraith, and Replicators, those are the higher prices, but still low in comparison to never hearing her footsteps, or even some patrolling Marine brought on the Daedalus to protect this place, make that soft thud-tap against the floors.

This place – her home – is haunted, and that’s okay. She’ll take it, because ghosts can be taken care of, if the research is true. Booting a dead person out is easier than those weeks where everything had been adrift, where she hadn’t belonged to a single person or thing. Sedge had been with her mother, because she couldn’t take care of herself – much less something she loved so much. The last thing that she had loved and protected had been snatched away, like a bully taking lunch money. Losing Sedge would have been too much loss, too quick. But she had won back what was hers. It wasn’t for a group of people that no longer had claim. They had left for nearly ten thousand years, been lost somewhere in between reality and not. For the past three years, she had helped define and change the war; good and bad decisions alike. At least she had fought, and would continue. Finally finding the place that she had been searching for all her life, it would take more than a few Ancients to take it away again. Next time, it would be to the death. No, if she has her way, there would never be another “next time.”

Along the balcony, she feels a sense of peace, as if a ghost has finally laid itself to rest. Perhaps all the ghosts needed to know that their home was safe, in competent and capable hands; with her team, that is something easy to provide. No one would show them to the door again; no enemy would take her security away. Home is where the heart is, and those that are back in the city after that short break consider it to be more than a home – it’s a safe haven from all the problems of Earth.

There are things worth risking death for.


End file.
